Assigning such importance to place is a characteristic move for Mr. Nicolson, an elegant and erudite British writer ... He has set himself a difficult task ... Winning enthusiasm ... Teaches many lessons, but most of all that we should savor the strange and stimulating legacy of this lesser-known era.
Despite the book’s New Agey title and a halfhearted conclusion, which attempts to reframe the preceding chapters as nuggets of lifestyle advice...in truth Nicolson’s book has little to do with the self-help genre. It is richer and more unusual than that.
Nicolson continues his imaginative engagement with the ancient world, diving deeper into the lives of the pre-Socratic philosophers ... The idea of the harbour mind is a brilliant one and convincingly joins together disparate thinkers with vastly differing approaches to the great questions of life ... Structured to make its didactic purpose clear: Nicolson wants to bring these ancient thinkers into the present moment, to make a radical claim for their contemporary relevance ... In other hands this formulaic populism might be tawdry, but Nicolson writes this stuff with a twinkle in his eye. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that marries such profundity with such a mischievous sense of fun.
The reader is treated to detailed accounts of the symposia ... Vivid ... Veers between detailed and sometimes tedious enumeration of material condition.
It is no criticism of this book to say that it is meandering. The tone is one of congenial pilgrimage ... Nicolson registers the melancholy that now prevails over the ruins of Miletus.
Nicolson acknowledges the brutal side of Greek life, and he doesn’t shy away from the ugly realities of slave life, from endless, backbreaking manual labor to forced prostitution. Much deeper than a self-help book, this work returns to the past and shows how the ancients’ struggles were in many respects our own. A must-read for anyone interested in philosophy, history, travel, art and the quest of human beings to comprehend themselves.
